The £5,000 grant for buyers of electric cars, which seemed under threat when business secretary, Vince Cable, failed to mention it in the recent emergency budget, will go ahead in January 2011.
The need to reduce the amount of gas emitted each day by cattle is more than simply a question of good farmyard etiquette; the greenhouse effect of methane emitted collectively by this country’s 10 million cows is equivalent to the CO2 produced by driving one third of a billion miles by car.
An updated version of the all-electric Toyota RAV4 EV, a vehicle that was available to lease in America from 1997 to 2003, is to be developed with help from Tesla. Toyota expects to mass-produce the new car by 2012.
The competition between manufacturers to build the fastest electric bicycle can seem purely academic to cyclists in Britain where such machines must be registered as motorcycles in order to be road legal, but the recently-launched, German-designed ‘Blacktrail’ is a fascinating insight into the type of electric-assist bike that might one day be commonplace.
An electric robotic exoskeleton that allows wheelchair users to walk and climb stairs unaided went on sale this week and offer an exciting future alternative to electric cars.
